Battle of Hodów: When 400 Poles repelled 40,000 Tatars in 1694 | Hacker News Reader

Battle of Hodów: When 400 Poles repelled 40,000 Tatars in 1694

tvpworld.com

42 pointsredbell56 comments

As a Polish guy - I would not trust a single thing shown in the national propagandist TVP television.

It's really weird to see this on Hacker News.

Well, questionable original source aside, just went on a rabbithole in wikipedia reading about it. Or do you consider wikipedia also propagandist?

I'm not saying that the article is untrue. I'm not a historian. What I'm saying is that all content from this source should be treated with high skepticism.

The battle happened, there's no doubt. I agree TVP is biased as f. tho. Think Fox News if Trump was in power and Fox was state media.

Wikipedia absolutely can be propagandist. It's an incredibly attractive target for propagandists trying to insert their views and spins, and while the community generally manages to keep a rein on that for topic that get international attention, those which don't can be effectively captured by coordinated groups. To say nothing about the smaller international Wikipedias.

Wikipedia is extremely good at keeping and reinforcing a most popular point of view. Russians are using Wikipedia a lot, for example.

Many English Wikipedia articles about Eastern European history are propaganda from one of the sides. In some cases it's a deliberate effort by irredentist editors from whichever country to push their cause; in other cases, it's a result of editors from outside the region who can't read any of the the relevant languages and therefore don't understand that they are using biased sources uncritically.

> Or do you consider wikipedia also propagandist?

The Wikimedia Foundation itself is not, but there are absolutely cliques of editors pushing propaganda.

I recently enjoyed reading Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy,[1] which are rooted in history but with a thread of fervent nationalism running through them. Maybe it’s more palatable if it’s presented as fiction?

[1] https://standardebooks.org/collections/the-trilogy

According to literary historian and critic Kazimierz Wyka the Trilogy follows conventions known from... westerns.

Sienkiewicz himself went to the US in 1876 and spent two years there, which had an influence on his writing.

Overall his works purposefully had a "feel-good" narrative since Poland wasn't an independent state at the time, losing the status in the late 18th century.

Curious why you think HN is such a bastion of truth and reason to be honest ? Look at the super conductor news a few weeks back. More people bought it than I imagined they would.

That... wasn't what the GP post was about?

No but they said they were "surprised HN bought it", does HN have some type of special level of skepticism built into it that no where else online does? I personally don't think it does.

> does HN have some type of special level of skepticism built into it that no where else online does?

Obviously not, but there's no general factor of wrongness lurking behind it. HN has a crippling case of engineer's syndrome, but why should that have anything to do with Polish nationalism?

Weirdly, this article appears to have large sections just copy/pasted from Wikipedia. That or someone updated the wiki entry to match the article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hod%C3%B3w

I wouldn't be surprised if the guys from the state TV just copied everything from WP. They will do anything and aren't accountable for anything. Their WP page contains just a little bit of what is happening in Polish state TV:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telewizja_Polska#Controversies

As a Polish guy, I don't know why wouldn't you trust material from TVP History, the content there is usually pretty accurate. The same with TVP Sport - wouldn't you trust what they publish there?

Edit: this is not TVP History, but the point stands.

Yes, TVP is generally extremely biased and only presents the government's side of things. Similarly to TVN, another popular TV station in Poland, which is biased but interprets facts in favor of the opposition. It's just how things are in Poland, it's not too different from what you can find in the US.

However, TVP World (an branch of TVP publishing in English) is actually not too bad. It's still biased but not dumbed-down, I would say.

TVP is *heavily* funded by government and biased in favor of government, important detail when comparing it to other, privately funded TV stations. It's a literal brainwashing machine everyone pays for without opt-out.

I second that it is weird to read this from TVP source. I highly recommend to read Noam Chomsky's article on Eastern European dissidents [1]. Really hits home what exceptionalism is, by just showing in contrast to what happens in other parts of the World.

Also, highly recommend "The Last Of The Just" by André Schwarz-Bart. It is soo good that there is nothing else for me to say than to just read it. I've read it once Chomsky stated in one of his interviews that it was one of the best (if not best) books written on Jewish history.

[1] https://chomsky.info/19960123/

Chomsky has a pretty obvious pro-russian bias. He's a "tankie" basically :) Look at what he wrote on Russian invasion of Ukraine :)

As for Russia-US symmetrism - it's bullshit.

Soviets did mass ethnic cleansing in 20th century to the level that USA only ever aproached during the conquest of the wild west.

And Russia had its own wild east - which was conquered just as brutally as the American wild west and which is still ruled with iron fist. Where Americans eventually recognized Indians as a minority with special rights - Soviets are still sending their Indians in thousands to die in their colonial wars.

> Look at what he wrote on Russian invasion of Ukraine :)

Just let yourself think about what his counterparts in US were saying. That Russia would collapse and Putin's oppresionist government is going to be overthrown by protestors? Don't you see that what we get is Putin's approval rating a historic high?

And nobody in US wants to be seen as "weak on Russia".

Only now there is more people who start saying clearly that the war is not going to stop, it is going to last number of years, and impratant bit, Ukraine is going to be completely destroyed in the process. And what Ukrainian people are going to get in return? EU membership? Western valus? Freedom?

Once you get this, the whole narrative people like Chomsky are proposing, that in 2004 this, in 2008 that, can be seen in a new light. You can read "The Art of Diplomacy" by Francois de Callieres, about 17th century european politics, which is talking about how to do international relations. Really helpful to see that this situation in Ukraine is not new - in other words, what is happening now could be forseen before the war broke out.

ps. I know quite a few Ukrainians very well who escaped the war, many from the demolished easter cities. And it didn't even cross my mind to tell them that I oppose anything Ukraine is doing atm.

> Only now there is more people who start saying clearly that the war is not going to stop, it is going to last number of years, and impratant bit, Ukraine is going to be completely destroyed in the process. And what Ukrainian people are going to get in return? EU membership? Western valus? Freedom?

Are these things not worth fighting for?. If you don't fight for your freedom then what would you fight for?.

There are a few things worth fighting for for sure. And maybe in the long term current war is even better for Ukraine as a nation. Who knows really?

Ukrainians know. It's their lives, their country and their decisions. And Chomsky is telling them to stop fighting and surrender to colonization so that his political views can stay the same :)

Fucking tankies man..

If Ukraine was accepted into NATO in 2008 then none of this would happen. Chomsky was against that, i.e. his views are worsening the situation.

> Just let yourself think about what his counterparts in US were saying

Timothy Snyder for example? He's saying that Ukraine should be admited to NATO and EU, and that Russia needs to lose this war. What's wrong with that?

> Only now there is more people who start saying clearly that the war is not going to stop

All wars stop.

> Ukraine is going to be completely destroyed in the process

Already is. If you let Russia settle for peace on their conditions - they will rebuild and invade Ukraine again. Like they already did 2 times. So it's better to deal with that now than to give them more time to harm Ukraine.

> "The Art of Diplomacy" by Francois de Callieres, about 17th century european politics, which is talking about how to do international relations

There were no nukes, NATO, EU, UN. No relevance whatsoever.

> If Ukraine was accepted into NATO in 2008 then none of this would happen. Chomsky was against that, i.e. his views are worsening the situation.

This isn't the only time that this war could have been averted.

I also believe this war is partly because of the worlds weak response to the initial 2014 invasion, if the response to that was stronger then I think there was a decent chance the 2022 invasion would of never happened.

Again Chomsky and other tankies were arguing we should appease Russia :)

How many times can you be wrong before you realize your assumptions are wrong?

> Again Chomsky and other tankies

Chomsky is literally an anarchist.

Anarchist that supports a dictatorship :)

But it's ok, because it's a dictatorship far away. Other people will be opressed.

Wikipedia also has a brief article on the matter, the writing style there might be a bit more neutral: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hod%C3%B3w

Please forgive my ignorance, but how do you pronounce Hodów?

What languages do you speak? If they overlap with mine I can find in those languages the correct sounds. They don't exist in English.

EDIT: what the other guy said, google translate is fine

You can use google translate - it pronounces it correctly - https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=hod%C3%B3w&...

That’s a rarity. Wikipedia sometimes has IPA pronunciations and even – once in a blue moon – audio snippets that I trust far more when I don’t know the language.

YouTube has content farms that produce 30s clips for “how to pronounce <any word under the sun>”. YT used to be a good option before the content farms took over, now I hear some ridiculous pronunciations just for the sake of the clicks and the ad views and can’t recommend it any more.

Polish is almost completely phonetic. You can put any polish word there and 99.99% of the time it will read it correctly.

Well except when it doesn't, I guess. All combination of consonants may unpredictably get rounded down to f (wszystko) ą pronunciation at the end of the word has a wide range of sounds depending on regional accents, ę is the same but worse because it's usually ignored even in common words (część), you have all the usual Ci Cy Ca rules for palatal consonant, except these characters can also be part of longer sequences that are hard coded to a specific sound like szcz that is pronounced like "an untuned FM radio sound"

I would not be so optimistic to say 99%, but I think a lot of things like that could be actually assigned to some rules that are, well, actually applied pretty consistently. E.g. isn't devoicing of 'w' in 'wszystko' just the case of clusters of voiced and voiceless consonants? Similary 'Hodów' shows devoicing consonants at the end of a word.

I'm not sure about 'ą' - some examples would handy, but if we are talking about differences due to regional accents then following rules would be perfectly fine. With 'ę' - how do you pronounce 'część' actually? Again, I think the worst that can happen normally would be to be judged as 'ą ę'* ;)

I think that in general Polish pronunciation is fairly 'regular' and with applying just a few rules you would be almost always OK. Obviously I haven't try to learn Polish as my second language.

* For non-Polish speakers - if someone is 'ą ę' it means that (among others) he/she tries to be overly 'correct' in pronunciation.

Well ę in część is without the n never heard it with n, but I definitely use the n in words like jęzik, so yeah you cannot generalize between those nasals and "say n if it's in the middle of a word" only goes so far

Ą is a bit more regular at that, so usually loses the n when at the end of a word and never heard without n when in the middle of a word, except in places like Warsaw, and other cities up north, where I was called out as gòralski (which is funny considering I'm Italian, I guess I'm learning polish wrong but convincingly enough)

My first reaction was that I would pronounce 'ę' in both 'część' and 'język' in the same way, i.e. without 'n'. But I can see that pronunciation of these words as per https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cz%C4%99%C5%9B%C4%87 and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/j%C4%99zyk disagrees. And then a quick search brought these 'simple' four rules (https://sjp.pwn.pl/poradnia/haslo/Wymowa-samoglosek-nosowych...) for pronouncing 'ą' and 'ę' in the middle of a word ;-)

So yeah, everything is easy, simple and obvious when you are a native speaker and I stand corrected :)

Ah also chcesz I've no idea how to pronounce that maybe an X at the beginning and a fshhhh at the end no idea.

There are rules to devoicings, it's just that nobody bothers to remember them because you know what sounds good and what doesn't "by ear".

Sz/cz etc are just your regular dyphtongs, like English sh/ch/th etc - they are perfectly regular and phonetic. The only tricky one is rz, but it's also regular - there's a rule saying when you read it as ż and when you read it as sz depending on the preceding letter. And there's like 3 exceptions when you read it as separate letters - in words like "tarzan" :)

As for regional differences - all versions are correct usually. People in Kraków even accent on the first syllable and read "trzy" as "czy" :)

The accent is not great, but the pronounciation sounds good to me.

Maybe something like: hodoov

Hodoof if it where spelled in English. V is probably the correct letter to use for W instead of F but its sounds closer to F when pronounced

You can also go to Cyrillic and then use the standard English transliteration: Hodów -> Ходув -> Khoduv.

Though it might also have been Годов -> Hodov, with the Г pronounced in the Ukrainian / Belarusian / Ruthenian way, as a throaty H. Seeing old Polish names through those languages is often a worthwhile enterprise.

EDIT: I forgot to do the obvious, and check the current name of the town: Годів - Hodiv - https://maps.app.goo.gl/h6zA61k6CNTAEf787. Here Г is pronounced as a throaty H.

For additional context, Polish words are always pronounced with emphasis on the second-to-last syllable.

So `HO-doof`.

Grzmot?

How about surnames? Jóźwiak -> yoo-ZHVI-ak or YOOZH-vi-ak?

Hehe! A good one!

YOOZH-viak

grzmOt

oh interesting point: the slavic y+{a,e,i,o,u} thing turns those surnames ending in consonant+iak into a single syllable, whereas in germanic the y would be a glide, demarcation of a syllable to its left and another to its right?

'grzmot' has just one syllable, right (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/grzmot). So yes, you can't stress the penultimate one, as it isn't there. ;-)

I think 'Jóźwiak' would be syllabified as 'Jóź-wiak' or 'Jó-źwiak'. I may be wrong, I think we don't have always just one way to syllabify a word in Poland.

One exception would be words loaned from Greek, like 'matematyka' or 'fizyka'. But I think they are being 'assimilated' so one can say that they do not count anyway.

Polish has also a fairly rich system of prefixes and suffixes and I think some of them would result in stressing some other syllable than the second to last (penultimate).

haduucat

Bite your tongue and say: HODOR!

It sounds so implausible that it may as well be a pro-ukraine piece published on the BBC.

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